Initially coined as a term of criticism, the designation 'grammatical thomism' refers to a methodological approach that involves a conversation between two unlikely figures: Thomas Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although separated by almost 700 years of cultural evolution, the late 20th century revealed some deep affinities between their approaches to theology and philosophy. These affinities include an attention to language, a non-dualist anthropology that grounds human life in public shared behaviors, and a forgoing of the modern sceptical barrier between humans and the world they inhabit. In the hands of Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, Fergus Kerr, Brian Davies, and others, this synthesis has generated crucial insights for contemporary theology and philosophy of religion in the Anglosphere and beyond.
In this paper, I will summarize Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology (Section 1), and defend it from the main criticisms to which it was subject (Section 2). I will, then, show that Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology faces a dilemma, that is, either many claims about God are false or many claims about God are nonsense (Section 3). I will also argue that, in both cases, Lebens’ account of apophaticism faces some important issues (Section 4 and Section 5). To conclude, I will show that the failure of Lebens’ apophatic theology can show some remarkable feature of grammatical thomism, and its employment of nonsense.
In this paper, I argue that ‘grammatical Thomism’, based on a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, has a problem at its heart, relating philosophical discourse with theological speech. In surveying the views of Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, Nicholas Lash, and Stephen Mulhall, I explicate how these thinkers come down on different sides of this question, suggesting that their approach to religious language and particular commitment to analysing Christian forms of life lands them in a puzzle that must be solved, rather than dissolved.
This paper compares the dialectical relationship between speech and silence in the writings of three thinkers. The first, Ignace D’hert OP, was a student of Cornelius Ernst OP in the 1970s, himself a student of Wittgenstein. D’hert’s dissertation develops Ernst’s ideas into a Wittgensteinian ontology, concluding that the function of faith-language is the production of pregnant silence. Similarly, Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures, inspired by Ernst’s writings, begin with a Cavellian account of language and culminate in a theology of silence. The following year, Stephen Mulhall delivered his Stanton Lectures on ‘Grammatical Thomism’ that develop the thought of Herbert McCabe OP, Ernst’s Dominican contemporary. Also attending to the failures of language, Mulhall presents his own account of the function of theological language, which he compares and contrasts with Williams’ in a subsequent article. Despite significant convergence between these three accounts, it is well worth examining just where and when they diverge.
From its inception, the underlying realism of David Burrell’s (1933-2023) Aquinas:
God and Action has been doubted. 1 This is witnessed to in both the early reviews
and clearly evidenced in the work itself, especially the chapter ‘Truth in Matters
Religious’ and the broader discontent with any quest for certainty that Burrell
expresses. This doubt around Burrell’s realism has only intensified since the birth of
the moniker ‘grammatical thomism’, which situated Burrell’s reading of Aquinas in a
broader trend in theology and ‘revisited’ the realism. 2
This paper will also revisit Burrell’s realism, but instead of finding Burrell’s realism
wanting, it will argue that Aquinas is purposefully ambiguous as to how we might
narrate the relationship between language and reality.